1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to a heathcare administration system having an integrated order and scheduling system. Particularly, the invention is directed to an integrated order and scheduling system that allows an order to be scheduled quickly and efficiently from within the order placing workflow. In addition, the invention allows appointments to be placed on a waitlist and rescheduled directly therefrom.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Order processing products currently available in healthcare administration systems for placement of orders for patient services do not support an easy, efficient mechanism for authorized users to also schedule an appointment for service delivery from within the order placing workflow. This results in fragmentation of the service delivery process for schedulable services, requiring the user to enter a separate scheduling workflow to obtain an appointment for service delivery.
In the best-case scenario, the user performs several additional, redundant steps to obtain an appointment for service delivery. The most common scenario is that the process is split between two users: one who enters orders and another who schedules appointments. Typically, this ‘division of labor’ results in significant delays to the appointment making process. Consequently, available appointment times are pushed further into the future, delaying patient care.
Existing products on the market also do not provide integrated support for placing appointments on a waitlist, so that appointments can potentially be re-scheduled at an earlier time, for example in the event of a cancellation. In commercially available systems, appointments are typically manually placed on a waitlist for later scheduling. However, manual attempts to manage waitlists for scarce resources are usually ineffective and inconsistently implemented, resulting in failure to equitably address patients' requests. In the absence of an automated, integrated system for placing an order and scheduling or waitlisting an appointment, most scheduling operations are unable to accommodate a patient's request for more desirable appointment times. Consequently, appointment cancellations are more likely to result in failure to re-book the time slot on short notice, reducing resource utilization rates.
It is desirable when placing and scheduling an order for a patient service to ensure that scarce resources are managed in a fair and equitable manner. Efficiently accommodating a patient's request for a more preferable appointment time will increase patient satisfaction by enhancing patient convenience. At the same time, efficiently re-booking a cancelled appointment improves resource productivity through increased resource utilization.
Accordingly, a healthcare administration system is needed that streamlines the order process and the appointment scheduling process, transforming a fragmented workflow into a single, continuous workflow, so that a user who enters a schedulable order may easily and efficiently make an appointment for delivery of that service. A system is further needed that enables the scheduler to place an entry on a waitlist as an integral part of the appointment searching and appointment booking process, so that existing entries on the waitlist may be easily converted to booked appointments through a simple, direct process and waitlist entries may be surveyed as part of the appointment cancellation workflow to expedite processing of the entries.